Center for Emerging Worlds launches with a year-long focus on global Islam

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The Center for Emerging Worlds at UC Santa Cruz, which launched in September, has formed to address the many conflicts, environmental challenges, resource competitions, and ethnic nationalist and religious tensions in the world.

“I like to think of it as a scholarly think tank,” said center director Lisa Rofel, a UCSC professor of anthropology. “We are bringing together different kinds of expertise to get us behind the headlines of the major issues we see today.”

Getting behind the headlines to explore the nuances and complexities of world events drives the center’s scholarship and its programs, which are planned as public conversations.

“It is a way to talk about emergent world issues that our lives are pretty closely connected with,” Rofel said. “Even where we are in Santa Cruz it affects our lives.”